


ship's dawn

by kurgaya



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Din Djarin Is Trying His Best, Don't copy to another site, Episode Tag, Family Feels, Gen, Grogu | Baby Yoda Needs a Hug, Hurt/Comfort, Past Child Neglect, Protective Din Djarin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:21:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28240824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurgaya/pseuds/kurgaya
Summary: Slowly, the child uncovers itself. It babbles something, gaze trying to find Din’s through his helmet. It dithers in the doorway, and Din is glad he’s not the only one unsure about this new arrangement.[Post Episode 1x8. Nevarro is behind them. They're alive. Din tries to rest but now there's a child on board].
Relationships: Din Djarin & Grogu | Baby Yoda
Comments: 24
Kudos: 267





	ship's dawn

**Author's Note:**

> I just can't stop thinking about this dad and his magic green child.

The child is wary. Din doesn’t blame it. The Imperial Forces almost shot them to pieces just hours ago, and this hard-won respite in hyperspace feels fragile. Nothing can catch the _Crest_ in the blurs beyond realspace - but Din has to remind himself more than once. They’re untrackable out here. They’re safe. Not even Gideon could find them now, and Din left his fighter smouldering in Nevarro’s sands.

Din switches the _Crest_ to autopilot and slumps in his chair. Everything aches. The point-blank explosion of the E-Web should have killed him. His beskar is the only reason he wasn’t dead before he hit the ground. He was lucky to be wearing it, and lucky to have the IG-11 at hand. Din shakes his head at the thought and his vision blurs. The cockpit merges into a blue-grey shape around him, and he screws his eyes shut with a groan.

“Dank farrik,” he grumbles. It takes a moment for the nausea to pass. He’s unused to fighting heavy blasters and TIE-fighters. His usual targets have pistols and knives. A blade between his armour hurts to the Unknowns and back, sure, but at least it’s a quick fix. He’s going to have bruises from the E-Web for weeks. He can feel them bleeding beneath his beskar, and every little movement burns pain across his body. There must be blood stuck to his helmet, too, and Din runs his fingers along the base, swiping away dirt and more. He grimaces. At least in hyperspace, he can take the time to lick his wounds.

The child is bundled in the passenger seat, barely visible within the blanket. Its eyes are enormous and watching. It hasn't uttered a peep since they fled into the sewers, and that was some time ago now. Din reaches over and the child shrinks back.

Din shrinks back too. "Hey, I'm not going to -"

He cuts himself off. It's hard to know if the child can understand anything he says. It's never spoken - or muttered anything close to a recognisable linguistic component. Din knows a handful of languages, but nothing like what comes out of the child’s mouth. He doubts cooing counts as words. There doesn't seem much point in trying to reason with it. Din sighs.

He wishes he had the floating cradle. It's probably still smoking in the aftermath of the E-Web. Maybe he should comm Dune for it, but returning to Nevarro is a bad idea. Best to put as much distance between Gideon’s men and the ship as possible. Din sighs. Deciding what to do with the child was easier when he could just shut it away.

"Let's find you a place to sleep," Din says, and he kicks himself for compulsively talking to it. He gathers up the child and relocates deeper into the ship, and the child blinks its brown eyes but doesn't resist.

The inside of Din's helmet is dry with blood. He frowns at it in the privacy of the refresher, and in the corner of his eye, the bloodied man in the mirror frowns too. He really took a beating on Nevarro. That he didn’t dislocate anything during his stunt with Gideon’s TIE is a miracle. The same can’t be said for his other injuries. Din brushes a hand over his head, inspecting the wound that nearly killed him. IG-11’s bacta spray has done its job. It still hurts to hell when he touches it, but his brain isn’t oozing into his helmet anymore. Small mercy. He blinks away the black dots in his vision, counting his blessings. He removed his helmet for this injury - for a loophole. In the mirror, Din’s face shines pink from more than flame.

He sets his armour in the bottom of the sonic for cleaning. He allows himself five minutes to sanitise before applying the bacta gel. It’s at times like this that he misses water showers the most. The sonic better suits his lifestyle and the ship, but there’s nothing quite like a shower with clean, hot water. Or a _bath_. Din can’t remember the last time he had a bath. Five minutes already feels too long to be without his armour, and he slips into a clean bodysuit with a sigh. Even in the privacy of his own ship, he feels exposed.

There’s a coo from outside the refresher. Din’s head whips up at the sound. The child must have wandered out of the sleeping chamber, and Din groans in more than annoyance as pain spasms down his neck. He catches himself onto the sink before he collapses. Cracking open the front of his head as well as the back is the last thing he needs.

“ _Kriff_.”

It must be whiplash. Din hopes it is. Anything else might be difficult to fix.

He eases his helmet on and opens the door. The child peeps inside, its ears flattened back. Three little claws curl around the doorframe. It doesn’t even reach Din’s knee.

“What?” Din bites out, regretting it immediately. The child coos again, but this time it’s more of a warble. It buries its face into its oversized robe, impossibly small in Din’s shadow. He stares at it for a moment before releasing his anger into a silent curse.

Din’s hurt and tired - _but so is the child_ , he reminds himself. He sits down in the refresher beside his pile of armour, hoping not to scare the kid any further and not sure why he cares. He’d been sure it was a moment of madness that compelled him to take back the child. A moment of guilt, even, and shame. He feels that shame now, barely dressed and struggling to hold himself together, and snapping at a babe.

Slowly, the child uncovers itself. It babbles something, gaze trying to find Din’s through his helmet. It won’t find anything worth looking at, but somehow its ears perk up as though it likes what it sees. Its mouth opens into something of a smile. Still, it dithers in the doorway, and Din is glad he’s not the only one unsure about this new arrangement.

The _Crest_ rocks gently in hyperspace. Shame it can’t rock the child to sleep.

“Come here, then,” Din tries. He hasn’t dealt with a child for a long time. He’s never had a foundling or a clan of his own, and his duties to the Tribe were firmly of the hunting and gathering sort. He supposes that’s all different, now. The Covert is abandoned and the Tribe is scattered. Most of them are dead (because of him). Din is a clan of two. This child is his foundling unless he returns it to its kind.

This frightened child. Din doesn’t want to know what the Imps were doing to it. He doesn’t want to think about his part in that.

The child totters over. It looks at everything in the room once, then twice, and then settles its eyes on the tube of bacta gel in Din’s hands. It lays its little claws on Din’s leg.

Something in Din’s body… alters. There is no other word for it. It feels as though the child reaches in and grabs a handful of his blood. He remembers Karga’s injury and miraculous healing all at once, and how the child had subdued the mudhorn and slept for days.

“No!” Din snaps, lifting the child away. The sensation vanishes. His heart hammers in his chest, reclaiming control of his body once again. Stars above, the feeling only lasted a second, but already some of the pain has eased. “Don’t do that. You’ll hurt yourself.”

The child squeaks in fear or outrage and latches onto Din’s helmet instead. Its face twists when its odd healing know-how doesn’t work. Din’s relieved for all of two seconds until the child’s lip starts to quiver.

“Don’t cry,” he begs, listening to it snivel. He glances around helplessly, wincing at the pain of whiplash. The child snivels louder, grasping at Din’s helmet as though it’s trying to claw through. “Look, let’s just sleep. You have to be tired, right?”

It presses its face against Din’s visor. Its arms close around the beskar in a hug.

“Okay,” Din says. “Okay.”

He sits there until the baby exhausts itself. His arms begin to ache from holding it up. Eventually, the child’s sniffling quietens into near-silent snores. Din unpeels it from his face. There are tears on his visor - and snot. He sits there for a while longer and contemplates his life.

The child sleeps. Din can’t keep referring to it as “it” but he doesn’t know its name - or if it even has one. He doesn’t know if its species has gender or binary sex. It can’t even talk and tell Din these things itself.

He wonders how long it spent on Arvala-7 locked inside that warehouse. Perhaps it’s for the best that Din doesn’t have the cradle right now.

He heaves himself up from the floor. The sleeping chamber is only the next door over, and Din settles the child inside. There’s only room for one person to lie. Leather netting hangs across the ceiling in the hold and he pulls some down. He doesn’t have much in the way of provisions. Regardless, the child needs a better place to sleep, so he fashions it into a small hammock and secures it inside the sleeping chamber. It will do.

Of course, the child’s presence means Din won’t be able to remove his helmet. He considers hanging the hammock elsewhere but discards the thought. He’d rather keep an eye on the kid. It’s not as though he hasn’t slept in his helmet before.

He closes the sleeping chamber behind him. Hopefully, the child will stay put this time. It seems unlikely.

Din smiles despite himself. A troublemaker as a foundling is… fitting. Stars know that Din stumbles into trouble every single day of his life.

The child sleeps through a night cycle. The lights on the _Crest_ dim and brighten like the sun. It doesn’t make much difference to Din through the dark of his visor, but it helps his body maintain its cycles. There are too many planets out there that turn so differently to Nevarro. He has no idea what the baby is used to, but with enough time, the “sun” on the _Razor Crest_ could become its norm.

Din resumes his routine while the child sleeps. He cleans his armour. He runs a maintenance scan on the ship. He reapplies bacta to his wounds and checks the baby. The purple bruises across its tiny, green body have him swearing to Jakku and back. Somehow, it doesn’t wake as Din slathers it with bacta gel.

It’s been a long day. For both of them. Din would very much like it to end.

The child wakes at ship’s dawn. Din is cycling through his datafiles on hospitable planets when he hears the sleeping chamber _whoosh_ open. He doubts it can climb the ladder to the cockpit, but when he spins the pilot’s chair around, there it is. Its ears twitch upwards as it wobbles in through the doorway. It almost looks… happy to see him.

Din can’t imagine why. He nearly fed it to a mudhorn on accident and then left it with the Imperials. The fact he stole it back doesn’t change what happened. The Imps wanted it for their… _experiments_. Din _gave_ it to them for their experiments.

There’s a reason he’s never had a foundling. There’s a reason he hunted for the Tribe.

“Bu,” the child says, holding up its arms. If it can climb a ladder, then it can climb the chair. But Din’s not sure that’s what it wants.

He leans down. The child’s hands remain outstretched, although it does huddle down into its clothes. Craving attention, but still unsure. Din doubts anyone has given it attention before. He thinks of the bruises and hates Gideon, and the Imps, and _himself_ even more.

“I don’t know what you see in me.”

“Bu!” the child demands. Its hands clasp the air, reaching, asking.

The _Crest_ is safe in hyperspace for a while longer. Din scoops the kid up and is glad for that time.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! All comments appreciated :)


End file.
